I know that lots of CF developers asked for it, so here it is: ColdFusion Builder Express Edition.

What it is about exactly? If you don’t enter a serial number when you start ColdFusion Builder, you will use the trial version of the full-featured ColdFusion Builder 2.0 for 60 days. After that period, you will automatically switch to a feature-limited – and FREE – Express Edition with only access to basic features such as editor, code assist, and syntax highlighting. POINT: no hover help, code insight, quick fix, code formatting, etc… for you. Sniff…

Few days ago, Adobe launched a new project called Adobe TV Community Translation: the goal is to extends the reach of Adobe TV content by asking worldwide volunteer translators to translate videos into any language. Adobe TV has teamed up with dotSUB to make this process easy: they will provide an intuitive line-by-line translation tools to translate the video captions or transcript. Anyone fluent in English and at least one other language can apply to be a translator. As you are volunteer, you won’t be paid for the job but instead your profile will be featured in the Translator Showcase that will launch soon. So why would you want to become a translator? If you’re not a native English speaker, you probably know some people or a whole community that may benefit from translated videos, especially with a great content as Adobe TV!

Personally I applied to do some French translations and I greatly encourage you to do so in your native language, if not English of course! Just apply here.

First of all I want to tell that this blog post is not really a rant against an OS or software vendor but I wanted to share my latest “bad luck” to create “awareness” regarding auto-update features…

My main computer at Home is a Windows 7 64bits machine (no bad joke already please…) that is really running well… until 3 weeks ago: on this PC, I installed a mandatory anti-virus, lots of Adobe software and development tools, some games, a huge photo library (about 8000) etc… nothing bad at all you would say, but one day my wife was just opening Skype when some nasty messages started to pop-up.

“COM Surrogate has stopped working”

“Access violation …. in module ntdll.dll ….”

“Program X has stopped working”

My first reaction was WTF!?! Then I started to try to understand what was happening exactly, which program could cause the trouble…but messages were so explicit, and I had no luck with Google this time, that I finally gave up and decided to go for a fresh install.

During my re-installation process, the problem happened again (Oh my…) but this time, as there were less programs installed and I had a better luck with Google, I found out that it was the latest update of my anti-virus that was causing the problem That piece of software was running fine for years until that damned auto-update! I was very disappointed, frustrated and about to uninstall this program forever.

But thinking twice, I remembered that such problems had happened already several times (maybe not that bad…), with several different software and different OS (maybe some of you remember my MacOS X failure in a middle of a talk…).

PS: for the record, my anti-virus is Avast and their latest update (5.1.899) seems to break some Win 7 64bits machine but not all of them. A workaround is to disable the behavior shield which seems to be the faulty part.

I’m proud to announce that I’ve been renew as an Adobe Community Professional for 2011: I’m very excited again this year as I have a tremendous amount of ideas, but first I want to give a big THANK YOU to Adobe and especially the Community Team – Liz, Rachel, Magda, Aaron and John(hope I didn’t miss anyone but several names should be added to that list for sure…).

This year there is also a new Community Program called Adobe Community Champions: you can read more about it and the difference with the ACP program here. I’m very happy to see a lot of familiar names in both programs, congrats to all of you! You can consult the full list of the group members following the links below…

I usually forget to post a review of the books that I’ve read – sorry to the authors, I will start to correct this with my latest one.

Have you ever tried to convince your co-workers to adopt a new development technique, your boss to buy a new product? Maybe you succeeded/failed or were too afraid of even trying ? Did you understand what you did wrong or right?

Terry Ryan wrote this book to help you to identify the kind of people you have in front of you by putting them in group of skeptics (The Uninformed,The Irrational, The Boss, etc…) and giving some hints and techniques on how to counter their arguments and put them on your side. I was smiling while reading the first chapters as I was thinking about my own experience and how it could really fit in the patterns that Terry defined in his book. I was really interested to read about the techniques to counter them (Gain Expertise, Create Trust, Propose Compromise, Build a Bridge, etc…) and could clearly understand now that when I failed it’s because I was not enough prepared – yep, convincing people can be a long journey! What I like also in this book is that it makes you think about your own motivations also: Why do I want that change? Is it solving a real problem? At the end you will get an overall strategy that could sound simple, but “simple does not mean easy”.

So it’s definitively a book I recommend to anyone who wants to make “things move forward at his workplace” (by using better tools or techniques) but is not sure how to succeed. Maybe success won’t be there at the end, but this book will guide you in the right direction!